Helen of Troy

"Beauty, terrible beauty! A deathless goddess—so she strikes our eyes!" (Homer, The Iliad)

THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS: My interpretation of HELEN OF TROY (also known as Helen of Sparta), set in Late Bronze Age Greece or the Mycenaean period. The mythical daughter of Zeus and wife of the Spartan king Menelaus whose love affair with the Trojan prince Paris was the cause of the Trojan War, according to the 8th century BC Greek poet Homer and later authors.

Homer deliberately avoided giving a detailed description of Helen’s physical appearance in his epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, other than emphasising her divine, ethereal beauty, and using the epithets “white-armed” and “lovely-haired”. We know from iconography that a pale complexion was considered the feminine ideal of beauty in almost all the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age, in contrast with the masculine ideal which was an extremely tanned skin.

It’s later Classical authors like Sappho of Lesbos, NOT Homer, that first use the ambiguous term “xanthos” in reference to Helen’s hair colour, which can be interpreted as the range of dark blond or light brown hair colours that many southern Europeans have, or even a blondish shade of red hair or reddish blond. A reddish colour was often used by ancient Greek and Roman artists in idealized representations of women. Basically, “xanthos” could be any hair colour resembling gold or copper, rather than the platinum blond more commonly associated with northern Europeans, which is as rare as a unicorn in southern Europe. That’s pretty much everything we know about Helen’s appearance from Classical authors. The rest comes from art and iconography.

Classical Greek artists represented any female figure based on the ideal of beauty of the Classical period, making no distinction between Helen or any other woman. But contrary to Classical Greek art, women in Minoan and Mycenaean art from the Bronze Age are always depicted with extremely hourglass bodies, comically narrow waists, firm exposed breasts, long colourful skirts, elaborate hairstyles, lots of jewellery and heavy make-up.